Cholesterol is an essential component of animal cell membranes; as such, it is synthesized by all animal cells. Regardless of its bad name, cholesterol is essential for life.
Cholesterol comes from two sources. Your liver makes all the cholesterol you need. The remainder of the cholesterol in your body comes from foods from animals. For example, meat, poultry and dairy products all contain dietary cholesterol.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2015–2016, 12%Trusted Source of people aged 20 years or older in the United States had high cholesterol.
Cholesterol is a waxy substance. It’s not inherently “bad.” Your body needs it to build cells and make vitamins and other hormones. But too much cholesterol can pose a problem.
Cholesterol travels through the blood on proteins called lipoproteins. Two types of lipoproteins carry cholesterol throughout the body:
Even if you have a healthy weight, your cholesterol can be abnormal. Other factors that impact your cholesterol are the foods you eat, your exercise habits, whether you smoke, and how much alcohol you drink
You can do many things to improve your cholesterol levels and keep them in a healthy range!
High cholesterol does not always result in symptoms. That’s why it’s a good idea to have regular blood tests to check for high cholesterol. The only ‘symptoms’ cholesterol can be linked to are late symptoms, such as heart and blood vessel damage and blockage caused by massive cholesterol accumulation. This can result in chest pain (angina), a heart attack, or even death.
The amount of cholesterol consumed does not always correspond to cholesterol levels. Eating sweets, or simple carbohydrates, even if one does not eat much cholesterol, can result in elevated cholesterol levels. And people who exercise are less likely to see elevations in cholesterol from eating cholesterol compared with sedentary people.
We recommend that you should not consume much red meat, cheese, and eggs because it contains saturated fat and cholesterol. Cholesterol is an animal product, so items that contain saturated fat will not only increase cholesterol but increase harm.
It is not true. Your target cholesterol level is dependent on whether you have a history of certain diseases — such as heart attack and stroke — and your chance of acquiring these difficulties, which is based on factors such as age and whether you have high blood pressure.
LDL cholesterol (the “bad”) should be less than 100 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dl) among those of us who have not experienced any cardiovascular problems. If you have a history of heart or vascular illness, such as a heart attack, stroke, or other arterial vascular diseases, or if you have diabetes, your LDL cholesterol aim should be less than 70 mg/dl, if not lower.
This is a common misconception, however, it is untrue. According to the CDCTrusted Source, the prevalence of elevated total cholesterol in U.S. adults was 11.4 percent in 2015–2018. When comparing men and women, elevated total cholesterol was found in 10.5 percent of males and 12.1 percent of women. After losing the protective effects of estrogen, women’s risk of heart disease increases, and they incur the same risk as men.
In fact, because women develop heart disease later in life and live longer, the female population has more heart attacks each year than the male population. And when women have a heart attack, their results are often worse, and they are at a considerably higher chance of dying from heart disease than from breast cancer.
Thankfully, this is not true. Aside from taking cholesterol-lowering drugs, you can also improve your cholesterol by keeping a healthy weight, eating the correct foods, exercising, not smoking, and avoiding excessive alcohol consumption.
Diet and exercise are always the first and most important steps to take. Statins are very effective at decreasing cholesterol levels while also being very safe. They’ve been around since 1987, with newer statins having better efficacy, safety, and fewer adverse effects.
And scientists are still coming up with new ideas – newer injectable PCSK-9 inhibitors have also been demonstrated to drastically drop cholesterol to levels that we haven’t seen before.
It is not true. You will acquire weight if you eat everything you want and consume too many calories. You can develop metabolic syndrome, which is a prediabetic state, if you acquire too much weight, especially around your belly button.
Statins are not weight-loss medicines. Their role is to reduce ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol, while yours is to respect your body, which includes what you consume.
While there is some debate about when to begin screening for increased cholesterol, many societies, including the AHA, recommend screening as early as age 20.
The longer your blood vessels are soaked in blood that contains too high a cholesterol level, the higher your risk of cardiovascular disease later in life. According to the guidelines, the first cholesterol test should be done around adolescence, and if you have a strong family history, it should be done sooner. Moreover, cholesterol should be evaluated at age 2 for people with homozygous familial hypercholesterolemia.
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